Supporters of the Palestinians should oppose Assad’s crimes

In June 2011, inspired by the Arab revolutions sweeping the region, Palestinian refugees in Syria marched on and overran the border of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. For a fleeting moment, they were able to achieve one of the historic aims of the Palestinian movement: the return to their homeland.

The Arab revolutions had such an electrifying effect in Palestine because the demands of the revolutions were also the demands of the Palestinian movement: freedom, democracy and an end to authoritarianism.

It is shameful, then, that many international supporters of the Palestinian cause have backed the dictator Bashar al Assad in his war against the Syrian people. In doing so, they use the same justifications for supporting the massacre of the Syrian resistance that Zionists employ to justify Israeli massacres of Palestinians.

Just like Israel, Assad and Putin have bombed hospitals, dropped chemicals weapons such as white phosphorus and demolished cities with aerial bombardment. Who can look at Aleppo today and not see Gaza? Yet some denounce these acts as war crimes when carried out by Israel but celebrate them as acts of liberation when they are carried out in Aleppo.

Echoing Netanyahu’s slanders against the Palestinians, Assad says that indiscriminate mass killings in Aleppo are justified because anyone who opposes the regime is an Islamic terrorist. Just as Zionists do, the supporters of the Assad dictatorship say that bombing apartment buildings is justified because terrorists are using civilians as human shields. Supporters of Palestine should be very familiar with this apology for collective punishment – we reject it when it is used to defend the terrorism of Israel, so we should when it is being used by Assad.

It’s often said that the Assad regime supports Palestinian resistance and opposes imperialism. People who have campaigned in support of Palestine should be able to tell the difference between the rhetoric that a regime employs and the reality. The Assad government is just as “anti-imperialist” as Israel is “democratic”. As with many of the Middle East dictatorships, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism is used to justify internal repression and class exploitation.

The Assad regime has always had an opportunist relationship to Western imperialism, offering occasional token support to the Palestinian movement, but never enough to threaten the stability of Israel. At key moments, the regime has intervened to weaken the Palestinian movement. In 1970, it stood by as the Jordanian government massacred Palestinian resistance fighters. In Lebanon during the civil war, the Syrian army invaded to support the Phalange Christian fascists against the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its left wing Lebanese allies. The Assad regime has a history of collaborating with the United States, exemplified by its involvement in the US’s extraordinary rendition program.

But that aside, the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of Assad supporters is the height of hypocrisy when the main imperialist intervention in Syria is that of the Russian government. Syrian and Russian forces are responsible for more than 95 percent of the deaths in Syria since the start of the revolution. Opposing only the militarism of the US and its allies is not opposing imperialism, but simply embracing imperialism of a non-Anglophone kind.

People who peddle this argument often make out as if the fall of the Assad government would be a victory for Israel, yet Assad’s main backer, Russia, is no enemy of the Israeli state. Israeli-Russian relations are closer than they have ever been, with Israel approving the sale of military drones to Russia in 2015, as well as refusing to condemn Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

In 2016, the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv said that Israel and Russia had “become genuine partners who understand and who know how to respect each other’s interests”. Opposing imperialism is only meaningful if all imperialism is opposed and we give solidarity to those resisting US imperialism in Palestine and those resisting Assad and Russian imperialism in Syria. These “anti-imperialist” supporters of Assad are the mirror image of Western politicians who cry crocodile tears over Syria, but support Israel’s war crimes.

Solidarity is central for the Palestinian struggle to achieve liberation. Those who have been inspired by and moved by the tenacity of the Palestinians in the face of overwhelming violence should give their solidarity to the Syrian people in their fight against the Assad dictatorship.